Writing as resistance in postcolonial India

The Indian government has justified the construction
of the Sardar Sarovar megadam as a national instrument of democratization, potentially
supplying drinking water to millions of people. Activists claim that dams form part of a biopolitical
apparatus, causing displacement and relocation for indigenous people. Their
fightback questions ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and ‘justice’.

“The whole point of the Rally for Valley was to make alliances –
urban-rural, writer-farmer, musician-fisherman – the idea was that we were all
citizens of the earth making common cause of the struggle in the Narmada
Valley.” (Roy in Bavadam 1999)

“How can we accept that what the government says in the name of your
development is for our development, when our lands have been submerged and we
are not even being compensated for that? This is total brutality and injustice,
this is not any development. We are more enslaved than we were with the
British. We are left out in every part of the action of the state. If we ask
for rehabilitation we get jails and lathis. What kind of state and what kind of
rule of law is this? They don’t see that we are equal citizens in this country.”
[i] (Surbhan from Kakrana)

Surbhan lives in the village of
Kakrana in Madya Pradesh, India. He is one of the Adivasis displaced by the construction of the Sardar Sarovar (SS),
the largest of a set of dams built along the Narmada River in central India over
the last three decades.[ii] Like
Surbhan, hundreds of people from plain and hilly areas have lost their houses
and lands for the realization of this big development project and are still to
be recompensed. Their grievances against the state are often articulated through
an appeal to citizenship rights: what does it mean to belong to a state, or to
a free country, when the right to land and livelihood of hundreds of Adivasis
in the Narmada Valley has been ignored for almost thirty years? What are the
justifications that write the Adivasis out of the narratives of development? How
is the race towards development run at the expense of the poor, ethnically
different subjects of the state? These questions become central for attempting
to understand the Narmada Valley project in Arundhati Roy’s essay ‘The Greater
Common Good’. Her narrative, which contributed to the struggle at the end of
the 1990s, offers a point of entry into the debate over the dam.

Did the valley need a writer?

Planning for the Narmada Valley project dates
back to the end of the 1970s and has been opposed by the NBA resistance movement
since 1988. The World Bank, one of the main funders, withdrew its support as a
consequence of the release in 1992 of a critical independent report by Bradford
Morse. The court judgment on the dam construction was suspended from 1995 to
1999, fuelling hope for a decisive halt. The sustained fight of villagers
against the state, the World Bank and multinational corporations was regarded
with interest and puzzlement, even becoming an icon of resistance against agents of the modern empire
in Negri and Hardt’s Multitude. The
present situation though presents a different scenario.

On 18 October 2000, a judgment of
the Supreme Court of India unexpectedly allowed the completion of the dam as
per the original plan. After this significant setback, the NBA abandoned the
prospect of stopping the construction but did not end the fight. Its new
objective became the rehabilitation and relocation of the ‘oustees’ (a legal term
common in India to describe the displaced peoples) and to oppose the spread of
corruption connected to these activities.

The essay ‘The Greater Common Good’
by Arundhati Roy, published in the widely circulating magazines Frontline and Outlook in June 1999, called for participation in the eight-day ‘rally
for the valley’ that was to take place in July in the territories scheduled for
flooding. For its highly critical content and given the international fame the
Booker prize granted Roy in 1997, the essay attracted international attention
and gathered support for the rally. On that occasion, the writer together with
the activist Medha Patkar and other well-known public figures marched barefoot,
in Gandhian style, to express solidarity with the Adivasis.

‘The Greater Common Good’ accused
regional and central governments of dispossessing marginalized people in the
name of the ‘common good’ of the nation. Drawing together evidence from surveys,
available technical data and experts’ opinions, the essay pointed out the ineffectiveness
of dam technologies. It also exposed the process of recolonization of rural
areas by national and global agents, outlining the connection between the
central and local governments and the World Bank (for a long time the main
funder of the dam industry).

Roy entered in the debate over the
dam quite late, when the movement had already achieved significant results mobilizing
local activism and seeking institutional responses. Her trips across the Valley
in 1998 had the effect of re-directing public attention to the anti-dam
campaign when the general interest seemed to be fading. Her main
contribution was to shape a distinct language of struggle when the movement was
looking for more international visibility. Through the evocative action of marching, which evokes topical protests
in Indian history, Roy performed her closeness to the Gandhian tradition of
non-violent expression of dissent and to the struggle against caste
discrimination that formed an important part of the Mahatma’s political agenda.
Interrogating the unilateral logic of development that imposes an idea of
progress on the population as a whole, the dam construction interestingly revives
the opposition between the centralized control of the state and a more
dispersed local rule. The actions of writing and marching mutually sustain each
other and reverberate both within and outside the boundaries of the text.

Displacing the nationalist narration

‘The Greater Common Good’ starts
with an epigraph taken from Nehru’s 1948 speech to the people that were to be
displaced by the Hirakud dam: ‘if you are to suffer, you should suffer in the
interest of the country’. Nehru’s speech, famously declaring dams ‘Temples of
Modern India’, inaugurates the equation between dams and the benevolent,
democratic process of modernizing the nation. Of India’s three thousand six
hundred big dams, she notes three thousand three hundred were built after 1947.

Dams inscribe independent India into
the history of western progress; at the same time, the controversies they raise
mark an increased resistance against the acquisition of modernity through
technology.

Roy’s core argument opposes the nationalist
myth inaugurated by Nehru equating individual sacrifice to a precious
contribution to the health of the country. Intervening in this narrative, Roy’s
chronicle interrogates the nationalist assumptions passed on in this period, ‘when
dams moved men to poetry’. What is concretely gained through the dam and the
displacement of millions? Which narrations report the voice of the affected? Roy
severely questions the validity of the Narmada project through the use of
statistics on the relation between the expected revenues and the long-term
sustainability of the expenses required by the Sardar Sarovar and by tracing
the failure of previous dam enterprises. Dams, as she states, relying on a wide
range of official and third party reports, cannot be considered as driving forces towards future
economic and sustainable growth.

Common good, private property and orientalisation

Though commonly regarded as enterprises destined to
improve the basic living conditions for large masses, dams inevitably cause displacement
and relocation. Roy asks which subjects will be forced to sacrifice their land and village
life and her answer casts a dark shadow on the entire project: in the case of
the Sardar Sarovar, Adivasis and Dalits are the main victims of the politics of
relocation. In Roy’s words:

“A huge
percentage of the displaced are Adivasis (57.6 per cent in the case of the
Sardar Sarovar dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According
to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes it’s about 60 per cent. If
you consider that Adivasis account for only 8 per cent of India’s population,
it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic otherness of their
victims takes some of the pressure off the nation builders. It’s like having an
expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country.
Another world. India’s poorest people are subsidizing the lifestyle of the
richest. Did I hear someone say something about the world’s biggest democracy?”

When millions of
people from lower classes and castes are dispossessed in the name of
modernization, their lives become expendable
in virtue of a general interest. The victims’ voices do not reach large publics,
seemingly doomed to remain concealed. So, when literature brings to the
forefront the violence tribal people face, it resonates with their acts aimed
at gaining visibility in the public sphere. Rallies, demonstrations and other
ways of claiming rights animate politically driven literary accounts. This in
turn can open a breach into the language of mainstream media and politics.

The submergence
zone has been interestingly described
by Nirmal Trivedi, applying Agamben’s idea of
the ‘state of
exception’. According to this interpretation, affected people are subjected to the
law that dispossesses them and at the same time disconnected from their rights
to counteract this process. It is in the creation of these territorial enclaves
where rights are suspended, comparable to refugee camps, that modern
sovereignty reveals its iron fist. Dams thus appear as biopolitical apparatuses
showing how contemporary democratic states have assimilated the use of
totalitarian policies. Like walls in the
case of migration, they endorse power over people’s life and enact it on
targeted groups of the population, supporting what Agamben called the ‘democratico-capitalist
project of eliminat[ing] the poor classes through development’.

Roy’s text stresses how the contest
over the land between Adivasis and the state highlights a clash of conflicting notions
of the ‘common’, whose long history is rooted in imperialism. In his
groundbreaking work, Common
Property and Common Poverty: India’s Forests, Forest Dwellers, and the Law (OUP,
1986), Chhatrapati Singh shows
how the confiscation of land initiated by the Crown coincided with the
introduction of enclosures and legislation on private property. As early as
1824 the British started a process of the privatization of resources. In that
year, the Bengal Regulation allowed the acquisition of land, and the amendments
made to this law in 1870 and in 1894 shaped the Land Acquisition Act in use
today.

The newly
established language of legality recognized property as the cardinal principle
regulating land use, betraying the traditional customary rights of indigenous
cultures. Moreover, the transformative impact of this action disproportionately
affected the Adivasi economy, which relied on the use of common lands for open
pasture, shared agriculture and other activities. The lands catalogued by the
British as ‘waste lands’ and declared property of the Crown, for example, were vital
grazing and firewood resources for nomadic tribes.

The usurpation of
land that followed colonization dramatically impoverished indigenous people,
whose claims over their habitations, as Singh points out, had never been stated
in the language of property:

“In the strict sense forest dwellers
have not cognized traditionally their habitat as their property, common or
private, since such a legal title did not exist in their world view…. The
British made use of this fact of monarchical claim over land to introduce the
institution of common property over which the sovereign has absolute rights.”

While the Land Acquisition Act dealt
with private property, the commons were managed through forest laws. Not even
these laws included any protection for forest dwellers. On the contrary, the
safeguard of the environment appears an objective to be pursued, in spite of,
or even against the inhabitants of these areas.

One of the revealing examples of the
new logic of governance, still in use today, is the introduction of a different
criminal code for punishing forest-related offenses. These rules construct a double
standard, shaping ranks of citizens ruled by separate codes. Among the
different criminal procedures prescribed in the Forest Acts, section 64 is a significant
example. It gives full power to forest officers to arrest anyone without a
warrant if that person is deemed to be committing an offence pertaining to the
forest. Stating special measures of surveillance and punishment for forest
dwellers, the Forest Acts have the effect of othering indigenous populations who did not rely on the modern idea
of legal property. The Acts subject them to different criminal norms. The
colonial law thus contributed to the production of an ‘other’ appearing backward,
by not complying with the economic and legal parameters of an instituted western
norm, and potentially dangerous.

As nomadic jungle-dwellers, Adivasis
were perceived as representatives of a state of nature. In accordance with a view
gaining momentum after John Locke’s Second
Treatise of Government (1690) where the title to property is said to
originate from human labour applied to a determined piece of land, the absence
of private property in indigenous societies was regarded as evidence of their
lack of social maturity. The orientalization
of Adivasis takes place at the conjunction of anthropological accounts and law,
which misrepresented them as backward and, in cases like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, criminalized them. This infamous act, declaring some of the
tribes officially outlaws, attached to these people a stigma of thievery that survives to this day,
even in regions like Madhya Pradesh where
few groups were formally affected by it.

Culturally instituted
discriminations and inflicted poverty both stem from British land policies and still
afflict forest dwellers. In the independent nation, questions
of occupancy rights have been pushed aside and the state is the prime owner of
the land. British laws like the Land Acquisition Act remain
in use and the reality of expropriation remains familiar for many Adivasis
who lose their land for massive infrastructural projects.

In her essay, Roy passionately declaims
how the logic of displacement causes the ‘disappearance’ of millions of
citizens:

“The millions of displaced people don’t exist
anymore. When history is written they won’t be in it. Not even as statistics.
Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times – a dam, an
artillery proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project.”

Her description of indigenous
people’s estrangement by the language of law, and their marginalization to the
point of being effaced from official registers, suggests the possibility of
interpreting the production and control of their difference as an effect of orientalism.
Orientalism not only produces and sustains a social stigma, but also justifies displacement
projects rendering Adivasis vulnerable. The framework of legality (on which
citizens ought to be able to rely to obtain justice) does not seem to guarantee
any help to the oustees. On the contrary, instituting an imposed foreign
language on the customary management of land, law creates a yoke of violence on
Adivasis deprived of their livelihood.

Roy’s essay continued to cause
controversies long after its publication. She was blamed for having moved on to
different causes after 1999, leaving the valley for good; but Roy’s
attempts to intervene in the struggle against Adivasis’ subalternity without
abandoning the vocabulary of citizenship had enduring effects and mobilized
activism both inside and outside India.

New agency

Employing the
term ‘citizenship’ outside the legal context, Roy fills it with new
connotations. ‘Citizens’ for her are not only the Adivasis and non-Adivasis
doomed of submergence, but also those who witness the valley’s drama in India
and in different parts of the world and cannot simply ignore it:

“The millions of displaced people in India are
nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of white America and French
Canada and Hitler’s Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because
we’re told that it’s being done for the sake of ‘The Greater Common Good’.
That’s being done in the name of the Progress, in the name of the National
Interest. Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what
we are told. We believe what benefits us to believe.” (italics mine)

Being a
citizen means being accountable for the actions of the state and for its
exercise of violence through coercion and persuasion. The concept of
citizenship here employed comprises an ethical responsibility towards the
environment as well as towards other people.

‘The Greater Common Good’ entails an
act of reading, motivating the audience to join the protesters in the ‘rally
for the valley’ due a month
after the publication of the essay. It directly interpellates a wide set of
readers, ranging from people in the institutions supporting this massively
destructive project to Indian and international citizens, with a provocative
and dialogic style. To those who supposedly believe in the national narrative
equating progress to technological development, the author proposes alternative
perspectives and urges to take into account her story: “Allow me to shake your
faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze… don’t look
away. It isn’t an easy tale to tell”. Here the choice of the style is
revealing. Roy walks with the readers through the ruins of a
‘developing’ world and into the valley, anticipating the march she was to
undertake during the mass demonstration.

This participative process, ignited
by the people and their struggle, has to go back to them. On 27 June 1999,
shortly after the publication of her essay, the writer poignantly donated the
income of her Booker Prize, gained two years before, to the Narmada Bachao
Andolan. In an interview I recorded in December 2011 with Adivasis occupying
government land in an NBA action, Ratan from the village of Sugat interestingly
described the boomerang effect of Roy’s act emphasizing how it concretely
helped the people:

“We later came to know, after some time that
Arundhati visited our villages and after two months the book had come out… She
filled an entire book with our story that was read by many people and that
fetched a lot of money. But then we also knew about Arundhati’s decision that
she wouldn’t use any of that money and she gave
it back to us in the form of the boat and jeep that the Andolan has now. So
the proceeds of that book came back
to the Andolan and the people who are fighting.” [Italics mine]

For the Andolan, the boat and the jeep are essential instruments for crossing the valley and reaching the hilly villages where Ratan, and more than 150 families of oustees of Madhya Pradesh are still fighting to obtain land and keep the state to its word.

This article is an edited extract of
‘The cost of dams’: acts of writing as resistance in postcolonial India’ which appeared in the Citizenship Studies 2012
special issue ‘Citizenship after orientalism: an unfinished project’. The
referenced and complete essay can be found here. The research
leading to these results has received funding from the European Research
Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)
/ ERC grant agreement n° 249379.

This article forms part of an editorial partnership, funded by the Oecumene Project and the Open University, launched in November 2012.

[i]
Interview recorded by the author on 27 December 2011 in Jobat, Alirajpur
District, Madhya Pradesh, India.

[ii] Adivasis are the autochthonous
people of India (the term itself means ‘indigenous’). Widely addressed as
tribals, Adivasis are heterogeneous groups spread all over the nation having
different languages and group identities. Adivasis, though, share a history of
discrimination during colonial times and in the modern nation that has
relegated them to the lower stratum of society.

About the author

Alessandra Marino is currently
Research Associate at the Open University, having completed a PhD in
‘Post-colonial and cultural studies’ at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”
in 2010. Her research fields range from postcolonial literature and theory to
visual and gender studies.

What images of citizenship are emerging in relation to the processes of decolonization and deorientalization? Keynote speakers Saba Mahmood and Walter Mignolo together with a selection of panellists will address this question from multi-disciplinary perspectives.

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